Engineering is defined as the application of scientific knowledge to meet human needs. In the twentieth century, scientific knowledge of electromagnetism and thermodynamics gave rise to the engineering disciplines of electrical engineering and information technology. Now in the twenty-first century, scientific knowledge of molecular biology promises to give rise to the new engineering discipline of synthetic biology.
Indeed, biology excels where other engineering substrates fall short. It is capable of atomic level precision in manufacturing, and stereo- and regiospecificity in chemical reactions. Biosynthetic pathways can catalyze difficult chemical reactions at mild temperatures and pressures, unlike chemical engineering. Microbes can derive energy from diverse sources and can switch between those sources depending upon availability, unlike electronic systems which derive energy only from electricity. Cells can make nanostructures with atomic level precision, unlike material science. Finally, unlike synthetic chemistry, biology is capable of an exquisite chemical specificity, sensing molecules at very low concentrations and catalyzing very dilute reactions.
These unique capabilities make engineered organisms this century's most important technology for meeting human needs. Foundational advances in the ability to engineer organisms can:                Spur the transition of the petroleum-based energy and chemicals industry to a bio-based industry;        Result in new treatments for human disease;        Improve the stability and reduce the energy consumption of the food supply;        Correct environmental problems that create a scarcity in raw materials, food and water.        
Toward these goals, technologies that accelerate the speed with which engineered biological systems (e.g., viruses, single-cell organisms, plant cells and cell lines, mammalian cells and cell lines, etc.) can be designed, built and tested are needed to make full use of biological functionality. However, the ability to engineer organisms is currently limited. The complexity of the biological systems that scientists can engineer is constrained by the lack of necessary tools to design and test organisms. In particular, a central challenge is that when we construct engineered organisms and they fail to work as intended, it is difficult to determine why. This difficulty stems from the lack of measurement technologies that allow quick, precise and high-throughput identification and quantification of the DNA, RNA and protein species in the cell. While several different technologies are available for genome, transcriptome and proteome analysis, in practice these techniques usually require expensive equipment, specialized expert practitioners and are very time-consuming. These analysis technologies are not amenable to routine use while testing different designs of an engineered organism. Hence, current measurement technologies are inadequate to support the predictable engineering of biological systems.
Accordingly, measurement technologies are needed to routinely test and debug engineered organisms. Such technologies can provide the ability to quickly characterize and localize failures in engineered systems, allow the development of computer-aided design (CAD) tools for synthetic biology, and accelerate the design-build-test loop for the successful engineering of organisms.